Person and honorification: Features and interactions in Magahi

Abstract

The Magahi language is rich in honorification morphology: it has three versions of ‘you’ (nonhonorific, honorific, and high honorific) and makes honorific distinctions for third person nominals as well as second person nominals. This work uses these empirical riches to develop a formal syntactic theory of honorific marking. It argues that Magahi’s honorific distinctions can be decomposed into two binary features, [+/–HON] and [+/–HIGH]. These features are specified on an Hon head that is part of the extended projection of any nominal phrase in Magahi; from there they can be copied onto verbal functional heads by Agree. It goes on to argue that Hon heads in Magahi bear a first person designated index that specifies the individual with respect to which the social standing of the person referred to by the nominal inside HonP is evaluated. This first person index is used to account for the intricate ways in which honorific marking interacts with indexical shift in Magahi.

Dimensions of honorific meaning in Korean speech style particles

“…In conveying such information, they are similar to allocutive markers in Basque (Oyharçabal 1993;Miyagawa 2012;Haddican 2018 a.o. ), Magahi (Alok & Baker 2019;Alok 2021;Alok & Baker 2022), Tamil (McFadden 2020, and other languages. 3 While Choo (2006) claims that there are only two types of speech styles, honorific and non-honorific, these are further classifed into heavily formal, gently formal, soft casual and non-conversational or plain casual.…”

“…Because the speech style particles of Korean always mark the relation between the speaker and addressee, we do not discuss the compositional details here. The work ofAlok & Baker (2019);Alok (2020), andBaker (2022) investigates embedded allocutive markers, arguing that in Magahi the individuals whose hierarchical relation is marked by status can be shifted in embedded contexts.…”